How compatible is Internet Explorer 6 with SharePoint 2010?

Question

I am working on a project for a company where we plan to use SharePoint 2010. The client machines still use IE6 as their default browser. There are plans to move to another version of IE but it will not happen for some time.

I have read the posting on the SharePoint Team blog that they are not supporting IE6. The issue appears to be related to one specific feature, content creation for publishing sites. This is not a feature we are using for this project.

I am curious if there are any experiences from the people on this site with using IE6 and SP2010. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

It is true that IE6 is not supported. If you try to access a SharePoint site with IE6 you will get a pop-up stating that it is not supported. SharePoint 2010 uses a lot of XHTML and CSS standards that IE6 just doesn't support so pages won't render properly and features will not work.

Bottom line... forget about using IE6 with SP2010.

Answer 2

If you wanted to continue to use IE6 as the client browser then you will probably have to write your own rendering for all of the OOTB web parts which produced non IE6 compatible code.

In terms of a business case for rolling out IE7/8 then this should be a no-brainer as the time taken to write and test your own implementations of all the OOTB web parts, master pages etc. would surely outweigh the effort required to roll out a browser update.

I would agree with Mike on this. Get an upgrade planned in ASAP.

Answer 3

SP2010 now supports Chrome, so you should be able to relatively easily implement Chrome Frame (which doesn't require admin privileges and appears as a browser plugin install) for IE6 users.